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2010 Football in review: What other people are saying

Long-time readers of this blog — well, comparatively long-time readers, since the blog is less than a year old — may recall that, prior to the start of football this fall, there were widespread predictions that EMU would continue to be the worst team in FBS. Many pre-season rankings listed the Eagles at either #119 or #120, out of 120 teams. On May 5, I wrote this in response:

I think it should be no problem for EMU to get one or two wins this fall, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them get three or four, with a final MAC ranking between 8th and 11th. More than four wins would be a big surprise.

So how did they end up?

Two wins, good enough for 10th in the MAC (ahead of Bowling Green, Akron, and Buffalo), and variously, 112 (Pre-Snap Read), 118 (Jeff Sagarin, looking only at FBS teams), and 115 (Mike Huguenin for Rivals.com, who shows he’s not really paying attention by writing that “[t]he Eagles doubled their win total from last season…”). It’s not any kind of championship, but it’s right in the range I predicted, and clearly better than most other pre-season predictions.

Everyone is saying it. Coach Ron English needs to find solutions for the mounting problems of this football team quickly.
This season English picked up his first two wins of his head-coaching career. His first win came at Ball State, where the Eagles won during overtime.

Their second win came on the last road game against Buffalo. Both of these wins were against teams that were having just as many problems as the Eagles. One thing that has to be remembered is that both of these games could have gone either way…

One thing that has to be said is that the Eagles had a better season than the 2009 season which resulted in a 0-12. Right now my biggest issue with this team is that progress is not coming fast enough. After two years we have only been able to pick up two wins, I think that that is a problem.

The school has invested in this program and now it is time for it to produce some results. I think that more people will be willing to support the team if they were given a good reason to believe in it. I am sure English knew, before he took on the job as coach at Eastern, that the team had a lot of problems. The question now is how bad do the Eagles really want to win and restore legitimacy to themselves? Only time will tell.